My first commissioned work

They wanted some sort of permanent installation that would make their hallways a bit more interesting, and they had previously seen one of my prints from the “Wasted time” project, and so I used that as a basis when I started thinking.

"Wasted time, 2009-03-27 11:49:01"

I also wanted to do something that was tightly connected with the department, and what they do, so sound would have to be, in some way, an element in the work.

As the work was to be permanent, and is to be there for a long time, I wanted to make something that would need little to no maintenance, and not have the risk of stop working in some way. It should also not be to obtrusive, since people will need to walk past it every day, and I don’t want it to end up be an annoyance to the people who use the premises. With that in mind, I decided early on that I wanted to make some sort of generative prints, and started checking out possibilities at a prints shop. The choice I made was to make prints on acrylic plates.

I went to the location, and after deciding where I wanted the plates to hang, when they were done, I recorded the ambient sound in the hallways, with microphones placed at the spots where the pictures would be. The sound was then cut to find some interesting segments and then normalized. I then used the sound as data for drawing curves, circles and lines. This was done with utilizing the language Processing and the library minim.